Counterfeit Postage On Ebay

I hope this finds everyone well. It has been seven years since my last post. How time flies.

Over the past few years, I have been gradually selling personal and family collections of stamps on ebay. I often market them as discount postage.

I have noticed that, in recent months, there has been drastically decreased interest in discount postage. Part of the reason, I suspect, is that there is now less eCommerce compared to at the start of the pandemic. However, I am also concerned about a significant number of listings by sellers, almost all of whom are located in Southern China, who sell coils of postage products (permanent stamps, US rate stamps, oversized rate stamps, etc.) at a small fraction of face value, like 30% or so. The listings often feature images of genuine Canadian stamps. The stores seem to thrive despite having less-than-optimal feedback scores, with most of the negative feedback being about receiving fake stamps.

These listings are very easy to find. I need not give examples.

Like all counterfeit products, these likely have substantial impact on not only the Canadian postal industry but also many local ebay sellers who sell genuine versions of similar products.

I have not come up with a good method of reporting the handful of sellers currently engaged in this suspicious activity. Any thoughts or ideas?

This counterfeit issue has been raised here a few times in the very recent past.

ebay attempts to solve the problem via it's AI to detect counterfeit listings. ebay is very bad at this. I had a listing of Scott #3192 flagged by ebay as counterfeit about 2 weeks ago. This is a 32c Remember the Maine stamp from the 1990s that is definitely not counterfeit. If I relist the stamps my account could get banned, so I ended up opening a hipstamp store so I could list it.

Meanwhile, other sellers who sell nothing but forever stamps, or forever stamps in combination with non-stamp related merchandise continue to have their listings up and running. I have had ebay users who were not my customers send me messages once they received the counterfeit stamps, asking me details about the genuine stamps I had listed to compare against what they received, because they suspected they had received counterfeits.

The counterfeiters do quickly refund money when they are found out, they comply to ebay policies as much as they can, other than the rule about clearly marking counterfeit stamps as such.

As long as there are folks who are willing to buy counterfeit items, there will be sellers will to supply same. Only when the political will arises to attack the source, rather than the end purchaser, will the situation change. Political action, or inaction, does have intended as well as unintended consequences. For being in Canada, be careful about complaining as the government is more concerned about folks being presumed innocent.

Such as it is illegal to post pictures on the internet of someone stealing because they are innocent until proven guilty and to do so is a crime of invasion of privacy. See: https://www.foxnews.com/media/canad...tion-privacy

How is it not an invasion of privacy to mention someone may (wink, wink) be unknowingly (yea, right) selling fake stuff?



Or life in prison for saying the wrong thing on the internet: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...me-bill.html

Hate speech can be interpreted by some as claiming one particular location in the world is a problem when said location is of a particular ethnicity:
Canada's Criminal Code Prohibits hate speech and discriminatory speech. Prohibits "wilful promotion of hatred" and "public incitement of hatred" and allows courts to consider whether other crimes in the Criminal Code were motivated by hate and to increase the punishment. See: https://bchumanrights.ca/hate-speech-qa/

Most of this has nothing to do with selling fake Canadian stamps, but why miss an opportunity to retail your obsessions, eh?

Unless things have changed recently, I believe ebay practically has a zero-tolerance policy for counterfeits. Unauthorized replicas are not permitted, whether they be stamps, Rolex watches, or the 1933 Gold Eagle. From my understanding, sellers cannot circumvent this policy by simply advertising their products as replica or counterfeit.

You are completely correct GeoffHa, it has nothing to do with sellers of counterfeit Canadian stamps; BUT everything to do with ACCUSING or REPORTING others for the sale of so-called counterfeit Canadian stamps which have not been so proven, doing so on the internet and accusing only a certain ethnic group, members of whom can believe it is hate, ethnic or language. Thus he who points out the problem is in fact the problem, not the presumed innocent sellers.



As I am not versed in Canadian Counterfeits, here is suspect listing for US Forever Coils of $68.00 face (not the 22 sold):

Well finally some one got arrested for this. But I had to laugh at the comment that ebay dosent tolerate counterfeit listings. Of course they do. How can some one possibly have an unlimited supply of forever stamps to sell at 1/3 or less of face value? And does ebay care? Of course not. As long as the fees keep on coming in, they will do nothing. I will note that in the article, guy was selling through Amazon and Walmart, not ebay

https://www.app.com/story/news/crim...FeedRedesign

This entire situation is a major peeve of mine. One of my first posts on this board was about this. Drives me crazy that people are able to openly sell counterfeit stamps for postal use and the authorities seem not to care!

you think there would be a market here for an expert someone to review this listings and get paid to find and detect these frauds to the market place so that they can delist and bar. Whether working as a subcontractor for the USPS or the actual online site.